Top 200 Best Charles Bukowski Quotes

Here are some great words from the author;

“Don’t cry.”.

“Do you hate people?” “I don’t hate them…I just feel better when they’re not around.”.

“We really had nothing to do but drink wine and make love.”.

“We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.”.

“There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.”.

“Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.”.

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”.

“There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”.

“Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.”.

“The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.”.

“We drink our coffee and pretend not to look at each other.”.

“I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.”.

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the colour of forgotten love.”.

“Never get out of bed before noon.”.

“As usual Carmen was wearing a very tight knitted dress that fit her like a balloon fits the trapped air, maybe tighter.”.

“I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.”.

“I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.”.

“My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.”.

“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”.

“My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.”.

“Life’s as kind as you let it be.”.

“You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.”.

“The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.”. 

“Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.”.

“I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.”.

“Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.”.

“I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.”.

“The tigers have found me and I do not care.”.

“Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.”.

“Without literature, life is hell.”.

“She was desperate, and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.”.

“Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.”.

“Why was it that every time you saw a woman like that you were with another woman?”.

“Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.”.

“There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.”.

“When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.”.

“I want to be with you, it is as simple as complicated as it is.”.

“It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.”.

“It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”.

“To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.”.

“But your eyes –– they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”.

“Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.”.

“Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.”.

“Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.”. 

“Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.”.

“Humanity, you never had it to begin with.”.

“All people start to come apart finally and there it is just empty ashtrays in a room or wisps of hair on a comb in the dissolving moonlight.”.

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”.

“And yet women-good women–frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.”.

“The thing that I fear discriminating against is humour and truth.”.

“It was best to stay away from other writers and just do your work.”.

“The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.”.

“You son of a bitch, she said, I am trying to build a meaningful relationship. you can’t build it with a hammer, he said.”.

“In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.”.

“Bad tastes create many more millionaires than good taste.”.

“To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”.

“People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.”.

“A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go.”.

“It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun.”.

“I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.”.

“When love becomes a command, hatred can become a pleasure.”.

“Each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.”.

“Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.”.

“There isn’t a better way to drink than at a small table over a white tablecloth with a good-looking woman.”.

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”.

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”.

“Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.”.

“I wanted the whale world or nothing.”.

“I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.”.

“If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.”.

“Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.”.

“Fiction is an improvement on life.”.

“I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.”.

“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time, all else is grandiose, romanticism or politics.”.

“In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.”.

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”.

“it’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.”

“I’m just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.”.

“I didn’t have any friends at school, didn’t want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.”.

“The most intense thing about beauty is finding it gone.”.

“It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”.

“Hello, Death. But I’ve had almost 6 decades. I’ve given you so many clean shots at me what I should have been yours long ago. I want to be buried near the racetrack… where I can hear the stretch run.”.

“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”.

“My 6-foot goddess makes me laugh the laughter of the mutilated who still need love.”.

“Love breaks my bones, and I laugh.”.

“Your boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.”.

“I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.”.

“Your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone, my editor phones me.”.

“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love.”.

“She knew what she wanted and it wasn’t me.”.

“The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them.”.

“They disgust me, the way they wait for death with as much passion as a traffic signal.”.

“It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn’t always there.”.

“know this poet: he’s just like the rest of us: he’ll vomit anywhere for money.”.

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”.

“My beer-drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.”.

“To fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself so that your life and your death will not be like theirs.”.

“Watching the bull get the matador, that’s the best.”.

“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”.

“And nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds.”.

“I never met another man I would rather be. And even if that is a delusion, it is a lucky one.”.

“In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.”.

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”.

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”.

“She’s more dangerous than all the armies of all time.”.

“Dogs and angels are not very far apart.”.

“Forget my brother, I am my own keeper.”.

“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it is your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”.

“It is hard to find a man whose poems don’t finally disappoint you.”.

“Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.”.

“Death comes slowly like ants to a fallen fig.”.

“I am going, she said. I love you, but you are crazy, you are doomed.”.

“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”.

“Beauty is nothing; beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it is for something else.”.

“People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”.

“I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’t happen.”.

“In the sun and in the rain, in the day and in the night, pain is a flower, pain is flowers, blooming all the time.”.

“The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them.”.

“When things get bad enough, the kitten will kill the lion.”.

“Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.”.

“She’s mad, but she is magic. There is no lie in her fire.”.

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.”.

“Baby, I said, I am a genius but nobody knows it but me.”.

“Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.”.

“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It is like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”.

“He asked, What makes a man a writer? Well, I said, it’s simple. You either get it down on paper or jump off a bridge.”.

“Of course, it is possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”.

“It is like an old movie, 35 years old, that nobody ever saw or understood but me and even though the critics would dub it ordinary, I like it very much.”.

“It is so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them when you don’t love them anymore.”.

“A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated.”.

“Nobody can save you but yourself and you are worth saving. It is a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.”.

“We must… We must bring our own light to the darkness.”.

“I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.”.

“You don’t go on “probably” when love and guns are in hand.”.

“To ignore life at the proper time takes special wisdom: like a Happy New Year to you all.”.

“Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that’s all there is to it.”.

“People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.”.

“Pain arrives, Bang, and there it is, it sits on you…there’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel and knows how to help.”.

“The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you.”.

“We are all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”.

“Why can’t you be decent to people?” she asked. “Fear,” I said.”.

“If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.”.

“Don’t you go to the movies? Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.”.

“When I was drunk and Lydia was insane we were nearly an equal match.”.

“In this land, some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck.”.

“She’s got red hair like lightning from heaven.”.

“There is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.”.

“Don’t do it. Don’t love me.”.

“Women: I liked the colours of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces…They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized.”.

“I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.”.

“There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.”.

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”.

“Men were children. You had to humour them. They could take no hurt. It was a thing every woman knew.”.

“Speed like a leper’s tongue on a virgin tit.”.

“People mostly, I can do without. They empty me I respect no man.”.

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”.

“You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”.

“Some people don’t like anybody who is famous. Some people don’t like anybody who isn’t.”.

“What women want is a reaction what man wants is a woman.”.

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”.

“I was in love again and I was in trouble.”.

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”.

“Every woman is different. Basically, they seem to be a combination of the best and the worst -both magic and terrible. I’m glad they exist, however.”.

“The less I needed, the better I felt.”.

“Few beautiful women were willing to indicate in public that they belonged to someone.”.

“They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you.”.

“Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.”.

“Once a woman turns against you forget it.”.

“Humanity, you never had it from the beginning.” That was my motto.”.

“Without literature, life is hell”.

“You bitch,” I whispered, “I love you.” Then I came.”.

“The nine to five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you.”.

“YOU DON’T SMELL FIRE,” I yelled. YOU SMELL SMOKE.”.

“Just living until you die is hard work,” I said”.

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. It was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad when you can’t feel any worse…But I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”.

“There’s too much coldness in the world,” I told her. “If people would only talk things out together it would help.”.

“We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable.”.

“The trouble with a mask is it never changes.”.

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more of you, until there was nothing left.”.

“It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”.

“So it’s always a process of letting go, one way or another.”.

“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”.

“There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.”.

“Our disappointment sits between us.”.

“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.”.

“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it, basically because you feel good, very good when you are near or with them.”.

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”.

“Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.”.

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”.

“I told her, “Hang tight, baby, it’s a crazy world.” And that, as they say, was that.”.

“The Bible says, ‘Love thy neighbour. That could mean to leave him alone.”.

“I guess what I meant is that you are better off doing nothing than doing something badly.”.

“The less I needed the better I felt”.”.

“as I continue to consume – while the madhouses, skidrows and graveyards are filled with the likes of me.”.

“You scared?” asked Garson. Yes,” I said, “but what about?”.

“We only have ourselves to go on, and it’s enough.”.

“The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship, you don’t have to waste your time voting.”.

“I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.”.

“Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.”.

“To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”.

There are other interesting words from the great poet. However, these quotes have been picked to inspire, inform and entertain you. Charles Bukowski was a great author to beckon.

Conclusion

Poets are people with diverse minds. They draw inspiration from different aspects of life. There are actually quite several great poets that are highly recognised. Charles Bukowski is one of the most recognised German-American authors. He was born in Germany and later migrated to America with his family.

Many of Bukowski’s works have been highly recognised and tagged more politically. In this article, we have been able to list so his best words from his books and his mentioned quotes. We hope you enjoy this. 

Frequently Asked Questions

There are so many poems by the the noble poet, however, I would suggest that the most famous poem by the poet is “The Laughing Heart”. The poem talks so much about hardship and being steadfast in the pursue to progress.

Henry Charles Bukowski is one of the best underground poets in America with so many works. Even after his death, there were so many works that were yet to be released.

Charles Bukowski works are inspirational and genuine. He works draw inspiration from real life events, community and others. He writes about Urban life and the hardship. His works are real motivation.

References

• Bukowski.net – Charles Bukowski, American Author.
• Legit.ng – 30 Famous Charles Bukowski Quotes About Love To Make You Think.
• Honeycopy.com – 95 Charles Bukowski Quotes That Blew My Fucking Mind.
• Coinstatics.com – 20 Of The Most Badass Charles Bukowski Quotes.
• Quotes.thefamouspeople.com – 100 Thought-Provoking Charles Bukowski Quotes
• Goodreads.com – Charles Bukowski Quotes.

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